“Mo
zchhaye rozum
Maah
e nau ke hilaal tai
Doh
gom praraan
Chhuyi
na neraan malaal tai”….Samad Mir
(O slender crescent of the new
moon,
Emerge from behind the
clouds,
I have kept vigil for you since
dawn,
Why linger in displeasure
still?)
The extraordinary journey of a Kashmiri labourer
who transformed the language of ordinary life into a poetry of spiritual
awakening
THE MAN
WHO ARRIVED WITHOUT A CROWN
One morning in 1956, something unusual happened
at Shalimar Garden in Srinagar. A poetry gathering had been organised as part
of the Jashn-i-Kashmir celebrations.
Poets had assembled, the audience was waiting, and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the
Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, had arrived. Yet the function did not
begin. Bakshi Sahib appeared to be waiting for someone. Who could possibly keep
the Prime Minister waiting at a gathering of celebrated poets?
After some time, a man arrived. He did not look
like a literary celebrity. He appeared to be an ordinary Kashmiri farmer,
dressed in the unassuming clothes of rural life. But the moment Bakshi Sahib
saw him, he went forward to receive him and escorted him to the stage. The
assembled poets rose to their feet. The Prime Minister sat beside the newcomer
and began talking to him. The man was Samad Mir. Padma Shri Moti Lal Saqi, who
witnessed the event and later recorded it in his monograph on the poet,
recognised him immediately. Samad Mir read an old Vatchun, a form of Kashmiri
mystical verse. The poem received enthusiastic applause. Remarkably, the very
composition that had once been condemned as Kuffar, or unbelief, was now being
celebrated before an audience that included the highest political dignitary of
the state.
There was something deeply Kashmiri about this
moment. A man who earned his living through manual labour had arrived at a
literary gathering without the outward insignia of scholarship or social
distinction. Yet his words commanded the attention of politicians, poets and
listeners alike. He had not acquired his authority through a university degree,
a religious office or a prestigious literary position. His authority came from
somewhere else. Samad Mir had spent a lifetime listening to the silence within
himself.
THREE
PLACES, ONE DESTINY
Samad Mir was born in 1894 at Sekidafar in
Srinagar. His father, Khaliq Mir, belonged to Nambalhar, a village about nine kilometres
from Budgam, along the Srinagar to Raithan road. Khaliq Mir was a farmer with
little agricultural land. To supplement his income, he worked as an Aari-kash,
sawing timber. The struggle to sustain his family eventually brought him to
Srinagar, where he earned his livelihood as a labourer. His life was shaped by
necessity rather than choice. He married in Srinagar, lost his first wife and
subsequently married Noora of Narwara, who had some ancestral property there.
Samad was born to Noora in Sekidafar. Three places thus became associated with
the poet: Nambalhar, Sekidafar and Narwara. They were more than geographical
points in his biography. They represented the rural world of his ancestry, the
urban environment of his birth and the family connections through which his
early life unfolded.
Samad's father was himself a poet. His
composition Achha Posho Lo Lo became a popular song. This detail is worth
remembering, for the house into which Samad was born was not entirely untouched
by poetry. His father, despite the demands of earning a livelihood, possessed a
creative sensibility of his own.
At the age of twenty, Samad married the daughter
of Shaban Mir of Nambalhar. Meanwhile, Khaliq Mir's children began earning
their own livings. Their father returned to his native village but did not
settle in its centre. Instead, he built a small hut at Agar, on its outskirts.
There he lived independently, cooking his own meals, praying and composing
Sufiana poetry. It was a modest existence, but it contained the beginnings of a
spiritual inheritance. Khaliq Mir died approximately ten years after returning
to the village and was buried at Agar. Years later, his son would be buried
near him. Between these two graves lay a remarkable story of poverty, poetry
and spiritual aspiration.
THE CARPENTER'S
ASSISTANT WHO BECAME A MYSTIC POET
Samad Mir's early life offered little protection
from economic hardship. In Srinagar, he worked as a daily-wage labourer
alongside carpenters and masons. He also worked as an Aari-kash, sawing timber
for a living. After his father's death, when he was about twenty-four, Samad
returned to Nambalhar. He continued to supplement his agricultural income
through manual work, including carpentry, masonry and timber sawing.
His hands knew the weight of tools, the
resistance of wood and the fatigue of physical labour. These were not
incidental experiences in his life. They placed him in intimate contact with
ordinary people, their struggles and their unadorned ways of speaking. He did
not belong to the world of formally educated scholars. Yet his poetry reveals
an extraordinary engagement with questions that have occupied philosophers for
centuries.
What is the self? What separates the individual
from the universal? Is religious knowledge merely the accumulation of texts, or
is it a transformation of consciousness? Can a human being overcome the ego and
recognise something greater than personal identity? Samad Mir approached these
questions through Kashmiri verse. His was not a philosophy confined to a study.
It emerged from a life of work, contemplation and observation. He used the
vocabulary of the people among whom he lived, but his thought frequently
travelled beyond the boundaries of everyday experience. The contrast is
striking. A man who might have been overlooked in a gathering of educated
people could compose poetry dealing with Shunya,
Soham, Samadhi, Maya, Sanyasa and Nishkama Karma. His intellectual world
cannot be understood simply by looking at his occupation or formal education.
THE NIGHT
WHEN POETRY HAD NO WITNESS
“Vesiye Kaar mushkil baar gob gom
Veta-ravun pyom
Gulala paanas kaaleh rang gom.
Veta-ravun pyom.”….Samad
Mir
(Oh, my
friend, this burden of toil is immense,
Yet endure it, I must.
My poppy-red body has darkened to black,
Yet endure it, I must.)
Samad Mir would sometimes rise during the night
and recite his poems. The words came to him, but there was initially nobody to
record them. This was one of the tragedies of oral literary traditions. A poem
might be born in a moment of intense inspiration, remain alive in the poet's
memory and disappear if it was not preserved. Unlike a writer who could place a
manuscript in a library, an oral poet depended upon human memory and the
willingness of others to listen and write. Much of Samad's early poetic output
was lost in this manner. Eventually, a neighbour began recording his
compositions. Later, his sons took up the task of preserving their father's
verses. Imagine what this means for the literary history of Kashmir. A poem could
survive because someone happened to be awake, attentive and willing to write it
down. Another could vanish because nobody was present to hear it. The boundary
between literary immortality and complete oblivion was sometimes no more than a
listening ear. Samad Mir is therefore remembered not only as a poet but also as
an example of the vulnerability of oral culture.
His verses eventually found a more systematic
record in Kulyat-e-Samad Mir. Moti
Lal Saqi devoted considerable effort to collecting the poetry from different
sources and bringing it together. Without such work, the surviving record would
have been poorer. The poet's achievement and the labour of those who preserved
it belong to the same story.
SOHAM: THE
BREATH THAT CONNECTS THE SELF TO THE UNIVERSE
Among the most fascinating aspects of Samad Mir's
poetry is his use of Sanskrit-derived philosophical vocabulary. Words such as
Soham, Shunya, Tyaga, Samadhi, Nishkama Karma, Maya, Mithya, Nirakara and
Bhavsagar occur in his mystical compositions. Their presence suggests a
sustained engagement with concepts associated with Vedanta and Shaiva
philosophy, although the precise extent of his textual knowledge should not be
assumed merely from his vocabulary.
Consider the word Soham. In Indian contemplative
traditions, Soham, commonly interpreted as 'I am That', is associated with the
recognition of a relationship between individual consciousness and ultimate
reality. It is also connected with the natural movement of breathing in certain
yogic practices. The breath itself becomes a reminder of a truth that the
restless mind frequently overlooks. Samad Mir used this word repeatedly. One of
his verses reads:
Paru Om Su
Om Soham Su.
The words are brief, but they open a vast
philosophical horizon. The spiritual journey is no longer merely a matter of
external observance. It becomes an inquiry into the nature of the person who
prays, breathes, suffers and seeks. The significance of this poetry lies not in
the suggestion that Samad Mir simply reproduced an established philosophical
doctrine. Rather, he made its vocabulary part of his own poetic world. In a
society where religious identities could become boundaries, his verse moved
across intellectual territories. Islamic mysticism and the language of Indian
philosophical inquiry could meet within a single poetic imagination.
Such encounters were not necessarily the products
of formal comparative study. They could emerge through conversation, oral
teaching, personal relationships and the lived culture of Kashmir. Samad Mir's
achievement was to make difficult spiritual ideas speak through the language of
poetry.
One of the most remarkable philosophical terms
attributed to Samad Mir is Turiya, also written Turya. In Indian philosophical
thought, the term denotes the 'fourth' in relation to waking, dreaming and deep
sleep. It is discussed particularly in the Mandukya Upanishad, where
consciousness is examined beyond these three familiar conditions. The term is
not merely another word for ordinary wakefulness. It points towards a dimension
of awareness that cannot be adequately described by the usual divisions of
mental experience. Samad Mir's use of this vocabulary is significant because it
indicates an interest in questions of consciousness that extend beyond the
everyday concerns of religious life.
His poetry also employs the expression Sahib-e-Hosh, suggesting a person
endowed with awakened awareness. This recalls a central concern of Kashmir
Shaivism, in which spiritual knowledge is inseparable from the recognition of
consciousness itself. The parallel deserves attention, though it should not be
turned into an unsupported claim that Samad Mir borrowed directly from a
particular text. He lived in a Kashmir where religious thought, folklore,
philosophical terminology and oral traditions could circulate through
conversations that left few written records.
His poetic achievement invites us to look beyond
conventional distinctions between the learned and the unlearned. A person may
lack formal schooling and still possess a profound capacity for reflection.
Conversely, the possession of books does not automatically bring understanding.
Samad Mir's poetry returns us to this uncomfortable but necessary distinction.
A HINDU HOUSEHOLD,
A MUSLIM MYSTIC AND A POT OF TEA
Perhaps the most moving evidence of Samad Mir's
character comes not from his verses but from a recollection preserved by Moti
Lal Saqi. As a boy, Saqi frequently visited his maternal home in Kremshore,
Budgam. There he knew a Kashmiri Pandit named Madho Ram, who was acquainted
with Samad Mir. Saqi remembered seeing the poet visit Madho Ram's house repeatedly.
The two men would sit together and talk for hours. Their conversations
sometimes continued late into the evening. Madho Ram's wife, Tulsi Devi,
affectionately known as Tulsi Ded, would serve them tea and food. Saqi
remembered both Madho Ram and his wife as pious people. Even after Madho Ram's
death, Samad Mir maintained his relationship with the family.
This is an important detail because it gives us
something more substantial than a general statement about communal harmony. It
records a particular relationship between identifiable people, remembered by
someone who had witnessed it. There was no public ceremony to announce their
friendship. No one needed to issue a declaration of religious tolerance. A man
entered the home of another man, sat with him and talked. A woman brought tea
and food. The conversation continued. The scene is ordinary, yet its
implications are profound.
Saqi also recorded that Samad Mir stayed in
Handwara while working as an Aari-kash. There he came into contact with elderly
Pandits and stayed with some Pandit families, learning about Hindu traditions
and the Shastras. These encounters offer a plausible context for the
philosophical vocabulary of his poetry. They also show how knowledge can travel
through the intimate spaces of daily life. The home, the workshop and the
village gathering may become places of learning just as surely as a formal
institution.
Samad Mir's life reminds us that intellectual
curiosity does not always announce itself through credentials. Sometimes it
arrives in the clothes of a labourer, sits beside an old friend and listens.
THE GODDESS TARA AND THE MANY DOORS OF MYSTICISM
Samad Mir's spiritual imagination was not
confined to a single poetic mode. He composed Naats expressing devotion to the
Prophet Muhammad. One well-known composition begins:
‘Kadh chon wuchh meh bala,
ya Muhammad Mustafa”.
The intensity of his devotional feeling is also
evident in the refrain:
“Had-o-lahad arsh-e-aala,
ya Muhammad Mustafa”.
Alongside this devotion, his poetry includes a
composition addressed to the goddess Tara. Tara occupies an important place in
several religious traditions, including Hindu Shakta worship and Mahayana
Buddhism. Her forms, attributes and theological significance vary across these
traditions. Kashmir also possessed a history of goddess worship, Tantra and
Shaiva-Shakta practice. Samad Mir's poem
addresses Tara through the language of longing, invocation and offering. Its
imagery includes flowers and the desire for the goddess to turn her gaze towards
the devotee. The surviving lines presented in the account of his work begin:
‘Praaraan praraan tarawatiye aetiye nazar traav’
The text then evokes the worshipper's repeated
waiting and the flowers brought for worship. What is striking is the presence
of such a composition within the larger body of a poet also known for his
Muslim devotional verse. It would be simplistic to conclude that every
religious distinction disappeared in Samad Mir's mind. His Naats testify to a
deeply felt devotion to the Prophet, while his Tara poem engages another sacred
vocabulary. The more compelling interpretation is that his poetic imagination
could enter different spiritual worlds without reducing them to caricatures.
His work does not require us to erase differences between religious traditions.
It asks us to recognise the possibility of intellectual and imaginative
engagement across them.
THE POET WHO QUESTIONED THE AUTHORITY OF BOOKS
At a multilingual mushaira held at Radio Kashmir,
Srinagar, Samad Mir appeared in the simple clothing associated with his rural
life. His presence surprised some of those who had assembled. Then he recited a
poem combining Urdu and Kashmiri lines. Its opening couplet was:
‘Pad pad ke gaya pather, likh likh ke
gaya chor.
Jis padney se sahib miley vo padna hai
aur’….Samad Mir
(Read and read, yet one may remain as hard as
stone;
Write and write, yet one may remain a thief.
True is that learning, and that alone,
Which brings one closer to the Divine.)
The sense of the lines is striking: reading can
turn a person into stone, while writing can become another form of confinement.
The kind of learning that brings one closer to the Lord or the beloved is of a
different order. The couplet is not necessarily a rejection of literacy or
scholarship. Such an interpretation would be too crude. It is better understood
as a challenge to the assumption that accumulated learning automatically
produces wisdom.
Samad Mir knew the limitations of outward
appearances. He had worked among people who measured a person's worth through
occupation, income and social standing. He also knew that religious language
could be used to establish authority without necessarily producing spiritual
insight.
His poetry questioned the distance between
knowing about truth and experiencing it. This distinction has a long history in
mystical literature. A person may memorise descriptions of the ocean without
ever entering the water. Another may possess no elaborate vocabulary but
understand the force of the current. Samad Mir's couplet continues to resonate
because it questions the vanity that can accompany intellectual achievement.
The true test of knowledge, it suggests, lies in what knowledge does to the
person who acquires it.
AKANANDUN: A NARRATIVE POEM
Samad Mir’s Akanandun represents a significant
achievement in Kashmiri Sufi narrative poetry, distinguished by its
transformation of a traditional folk tale into a vehicle for mystical and
philosophical inquiry. It is important to recognise that Akanandun is not
merely a short lyric or an isolated mystical composition, but a narrative poem
that develops a story through poetic expression, dramatic tension and symbolic
characterisation. The underlying tale belongs to Kashmiri folk tradition and
has been adapted into verse by different poets, with Samad Mir’s version
particularly associated with its mystical interpretation.
Centred on the figure of an only son and the
anguish surrounding his fate, the poem draws upon the emotional realities of
familial attachment, suffering and sacrifice to explore the spiritual
predicament of the individual seeking transcendence. The relationship between
Akanandun and the Jogi, or ascetic, lends itself to interpretation within the
Sufi framework of the spiritual master and the disciple. The narrative may
consequently be examined in relation to fanā, the dissolution of the individual
ego in the pursuit of spiritual realisation, and the rigorous discipline
associated with inward transformation. Its literary achievement, however, lies
not merely in the communication of a mystical doctrine. Samad Mir employs the
familiar idiom of Kashmiri oral culture to render abstract spiritual concerns
accessible through dramatic action and emotional intensity. The suffering of
the family gives the narrative its human gravity, while its mystical dimension
invites reflection on the tension between worldly attachment and spiritual
aspiration. Akanandun ultimately exemplifies the capacity of Kashmiri Sufi
poetry to unite folk narrative, vernacular expression and spiritual speculation
in a literary form whose enduring force derives from the interplay between
human experience and the quest for ultimate truth.
THE
SIMPLE LIFE OF A FAQUIR
“Yaavana lolla haeth lolli
Beyi akki latti royyi haav
Dohhai vuchha-hai thali thali
Kyoho kalli karu thahraav”….Samad
Mir
(O Youth of mine, come back once more,
I shall cradle you in my lap,
Return just once along this path,
I shall gaze upon you every moment,
And speak no more of the waiting.)
Moti Lal Saqi's account describes Samad Mir as a
man of simple habits. He preferred vegetarian food, particularly bitter gourd
and green vegetables. He ate little and drank salt tea with maize Sattu. He
generally avoided feasts and social functions. He also made blankets from
sheep's wool and sold them to earn money. In other seasons, he participated in
farming activities. This was no romantic life removed from material necessity.
The poet still had to work, eat and provide for his family. He had two sons,
Ghulam Rasool and Ghulam Mohammad, and two daughters, Azi and Rehti. One of his
sons died young.
Samad Mir's spiritual life therefore unfolded
within the ordinary demands of family responsibility and livelihood. He had
three Murshids, or spiritual guides, identified in the biographical account as
Khwaja Habib Najar of Agar, Khaliq Najar of Batmaloo and Ramzan Dar of
Anchidoora, Anantnag. He also worked alongside his Murshid Khaliq Najar during
the construction of Hari Niwas, Maharaja’s palace on Gupkar Road in Srinagar.
The image is unforgettable: a mystic poet working
as a labourer on a royal building, earning his livelihood through the same
physical exertion as countless other workers. The palace belonged to the world
of authority and wealth. Samad Mir's spiritual authority came from an
altogether different source.
His life suggests that renunciation need not mean
the complete abandonment of work. One may continue to earn one's bread while
attempting to discipline desire, vanity and the restless demands of the ego.
‘Taajdaaraan de na ameeraan de
Deeve jalde sadha faqeeraan de ‘
The lamps of spiritual insight, as the Punjabi
lines associated with this account suggest, do not burn merely for those who
possess crowns or riches. They burn for those who have learnt to loosen their
attachment to them.
THE LAST JOURNEY TO AGAR
"Ha vaawa ikh na dim hai graava havaal tai,
Dariyaav chhane chamahai aabe zulaal tai" ….. Samad Mir
(O wind, would you come my way one day,
Unhurried and free,
And lend an ear to my laments,
My pleas,
My silent agony?
From your flowing stream,
Where crystal-clear waters gleam,
Let me, too, drink deep of that water
So pure and serene.)
Samad Mir died on 9 January 1959 at his home in
Nambalhar. He was buried near his father's grave at Agar. There is a quiet
symmetry in this ending. His father had withdrawn to a small hut on the
outskirts of the village, where he prayed and composed poetry. His son returned
to the same village after years of labour and contemplation. In death, father
and son came to rest beside one another.
Samad Mir is believed to have composed around two
hundred poems, many in the vatchun form. Among the compositions remembered in
accounts of his work are: veta-raavun
pyom, tan naar daz aarwali, agar chashman bani gosh, ha vaada saryo, ath van maaney kyah, insaaf kar insaaf kar, ha Kan dooro, vanna kas rovum doh tai raat, mo zchhaye rozum maahe nau ke hilaal tai, tagiye godda kaas paanas tchhai, jaayi jaayi yaaras vonn me ditchyom, agar
bozakh yi chhai kath,paayi hyot aashaqav kaaba butkhaanas, aey peeri munn aey
peeri munn, ya zinda thaavi ya maari, vaar chum na vana-nas and
paru om su om soham su.
The preservation of his compositions required the
efforts of family members, neighbours, poets and scholars. Moti Lal Saqi's work
in collecting and publishing the poetry helped bring Samad Mir's achievement to
a wider readership.
Poet Prem Nath Shad also remembered him with
affection. Shad recalled visiting Samad Mir in 1947 as a school friend of his
son Ghulam Rasool. He showed the older poet some verses he had written as a
young man. Samad Mir encouraged him to continue both his studies and his
poetry. It is a small incident, but it reveals another dimension of the man.
The mystic who questioned the limitations of book learning did not discourage a
young person from studying. He encouraged the young poet to pursue both
education and creative work. That distinction matters. Samad Mir was not asking
people to remain ignorant. He was asking them to seek something deeper than the
mere possession of information.
WHAT REMAINS WHEN THE VOICE FALLS SILENT?
Samad Mir's significance lies in more than the
number of poems he composed or the unusual philosophical terms he employed. It
lies in the meeting of several worlds within one human life. He was a rural
Kashmiri, a labourer, a farmer, a family man, a disciple of spiritual guides
and a poet whose work embraced Islamic devotion alongside ideas associated with
Indian philosophical traditions.
His friendship with Madho Ram, preserved in Moti
Lal Saqi's recollection, gives a human face to the wider cultural exchanges
visible in his poetry. His composition on Tara, his Naats and his verses on
Soham and Turiya reveal a poetic imagination willing to explore different
dimensions of spiritual experience.
He lived in a world where knowledge could pass
from one person to another through conversation, hospitality, shared work and
the listening ear. He demonstrated that the absence of formal education need
not mean the absence of intellectual depth. He showed that a person could
remain rooted in a particular devotional tradition while engaging ideas
expressed in another. Above all, he reminds us that spiritual insight cannot be
measured by the clothes a person wears, the occupation he follows or the social
rank he occupies.
In 1956, when Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad waited at
Shalimar Garden for a man dressed like a farmer, he was waiting for a poet
whose reputation had travelled far beyond his village. Samad Mir had arrived
without a crown, without a scholar's robe and without the outward trappings of
authority. Yet his words had already entered the memory of Kashmir.
Samad Mir did not leave us a philosophical system
in the conventional sense. He left us poems, remembered conversations, and the
example of a life lived with simplicity. In Kashmir's literary landscape, where
celebrated names often stand in the foreground, Samad Mir represents another
kind of greatness: the greatness of a man whose outward life appeared ordinary
while his inward world remained immense. His poetry asks us to look again at
the people we overlook. For the voice of wisdom does not always emerge from a
university, a palace or a pulpit. Sometimes it rises in the middle of the night
from a modest home, passes through the memory of a neighbour and survives
because a son, a friend or a scholar takes the trouble to preserve it.
(Avtar
Mota)
